It Is What It Is

In the middle of a 2004 interview with an Irish TV journalist (video; transcript), President Bush, denying that he is swayed by popular opinion, said, “My job is to do my job.” This reminded me of a line I sometimes heard from U.S. officials in Iraq, usually in public affairs, when an unpleasant subject like sectarian violence or the electricity shortage came up: “It is what it is.” Such tautological assertions have become a useful currency of discourse in the Bush Administration. They refuse to engage or make an argument; instead, they are designed to foreclose any possibility of debate. They imply that talk of causation or complication is for wimps. They convey a spirit of tough-minded realism while managing to say nothing at all. They are at the same time no-nonsense and nonsensical. Like the gangster language of Nixon and his men on the Watergate tapes (“the big enchilada”), or the long-winded exegeses of Clinton and his flacks (“It depends on what the meaning of the word ‘is‘ is”), they express the mental atmosphere that seeps out of the Oval Office, pervades Washington, and eventually characterizes an entire government. When I think back on the Bush years, I will remember “It is what it is” as a linguistic marker of intellectual emptiness, and my chief demand of the next Administration will be: Substantive predicates!

Not unrelated: There’s a detail buried in Bob Woodward’s fascinating piece in today’s Washington Post on the Iraq Study Group. On November 13, 2006, the same day that the group met with Bush and heard an hour-long speech on winning in Iraq, it also sat down with General Michael Hayden, the director of the C.I.A., who provided the most convincing assessment of the war that I have seen from any Administration official. Woodward reports:

Hayden catalogued what he saw as the main sources of violence in this order: the insurgency, sectarian strife, criminality, general anarchy and, lastly, al-Qaeda. Though Hayden had listed al-Qaeda as the fifth most pressing threat in Iraq, Bush regularly lists al-Qaeda first.

As it happens, today’s Post also carried a story from the Pentagon that quotes the U.S. military’s chief spokesman, Brigadier General Kevin Bergner, describing Al Qaeda as “the principal threat” to Iraqis. It’s possible that the C.I.A. sees it one way and the Pentagon another. It’s possible that, over the past eight months, the C.I.A. has changed its views. It’s more likely that General Bergner, who used to work for the White House, is repeating the Administration line. After four years in Iraq, apparently, America’s wartime leadership still believes that candor is the enemy of success—that message discipline and the will to win can defeat the facts.